Sobre este lugar
Few police stations anywhere are as famous as the Davidwache, the red brick corner building on Spielbudenplatz that has kept watch over the Reeperbahn since 1914 and inspired films and the television series Großstadtrevier. Yet its most famous detainees were not gangsters. On 29 November 1960, Paul McCartney and Pete Best of a still unknown Liverpool band called the Beatles were brought here after the club owner Bruno Koschmider accused them of attempted arson. Their crime: setting something alight, by Paul's account a condom on a nail, to see in the pitch dark storeroom behind the screen of Koschmider's Bambi Kino, where the band slept. The flame left barely a scorch mark on the damp concrete, but Koschmider was furious that the band was defecting to the rival Top Ten Club, and the police took his complaint seriously. Accounts differ on whether the two spent a few hours or a whole night in a cell here, yet within days both were deported to England. The story has a happy ending: in 1961 the Top Ten owner Peter Eckhorn paid 158 Deutsche Marks, the cost of the deportation, to bring them back, and the Beatles returned for 92 nights in a row on the Reeperbahn.
Datos clave
- 2 Beatles arrested — Paul McCartney and drummer Pete Best were brought to the Davidwache on 29 November 1960, accused of attempted arson by club owner Bruno Koschmider.
- 158 Deutsche Marks — What Top Ten Club owner Peter Eckhorn paid the German authorities in 1961, the cost of the deportation, to get the Beatles back to Hamburg.
- 1914 year — Fritz Schumacher's listed red brick Davidwache opened on 10 December 1914; a police post has stood on this corner since 1840.